Study on the Tensile Anisotropy of the High Moisture Extrusion Structured Wheat Gluten

Studying and analyzing the anisotropy of plant-based meat analogs is an effective way to characterize their texturizing degree and understand the formation mechanism of the fibrous structures during processing. The differences of mechanical properties (elastic modulus,yield strength,yield strain,fracture strength,fracture strain and fracture work per unit area) along with the extrusion direction (longitudinal) and perpendicular to the extrusion direction (lateral) were investigated by analyzing the tensile curves of two high moisture extrusion textured wheat gluten with different flour contents. Results showed that the protein content affected the fiber arrangement and phase structure of products;except for elastic modulus,other tensile properties of the two high moisture extrusion textured wheat gluten were significantly different in both directions; the anisotropy indexes from fracture work had higher ability to discriminate fibrous structures than those from stress and strain.